1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a dispenser for serially dispensing folded absorbent sheet products through an upwardly oriented opening, and more preferably relates to an improved top-dispensing paper towel dispenser.
2. Description of Related Art
Paper towel dispensers used in commercial establishments generally are wall-mounted and dispense downwardly. Dispensers in which the towels can be removed from above tend not to be dispensers as such, but rather open trays such as the INSIGHT® Counter Top Folded Towel Dispenser marketed by Kimberly-Clark. Such open tray dispensers permit users to take more than one towel at a time, and thus do not curtail waste as effectively as a dispenser in which the towels are removed one-at-a-time. Also, with most of the towels being exposed in such trays, there is a danger that a large part of the stack could get wet or otherwise contaminated by a previous user.
One-at-a-time top-dispensing dispensers, sometimes referred to as “pop-up” dispensers, are most often used for facial tissues, in which a bolt of discrete, separated tissues is dispensed one-at-a-time, although the one-at-a-time dispensing is not entirely reliable. That is, the tissues have a tendency to fall back down into the dispenser, particularly when there is a relatively small portion of the tissues remaining, such that a tissue suspended from the top opening is draped over a longer distance before resting on the remaining tissues within the dispenser. This gives rise to the disadvantage of a next user having to reach into the dispenser in order to get the tissues coming out again, which is all the more undesirable if the dispenser is in a public place.
When the tissues in such a dispenser are an interfolded stack, it is particularly difficult to prevent fallback when the height of the dispenser exceeds the length of one panel of the folded tissue. Therefore, pop-up tissue dispensers are frequently no taller than they are wide, which plays a limiting role in their capacity and increases the frequency with which they must be refilled.
Also on the market are top-dispensing cardboard boxes of “wipers” (high basis weight disposable utility towels), sold by Kimberly-Clark under the trade name WypAll®, in which two webs of interfolded and pre-perforated wipers are dispensed through a relatively large diamond-shaped opening in the top of the box. In that product, however, if it is attempted to remove a wiper from the box upwardly in a one-handed operation, the wiper being pulled does not separate from the next adjacent wiper on the same web (which is actually the third sheet in the order of dispensing, the second sheet being that on the overlapped adjacent web). It is instead necessary for the user to hold the third wiper in order to tear off the first, after which not only the second wiper but also a rather large portion of the third wiper project upwardly through the opening.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,810,200 describes a pop-up dispenser in which a single web of pre-perforated tissues may be dispensed serially, by use of a spring-loaded tab 18 that registers within each line of perforations as a tissue is being withdrawn. This patent does not appear to address the above-described fallback problems, and entails a somewhat more complicated structure to deal with the tissues being initially interconnected within the dispenser.